The Town Dreamer
Bailey Sarsquatch was well known throughout her town as a dreamer. She had to be kept in a zinc lined box indeed, to stop her dreams from getting out and infecting the town. Her dreams were so powerful that the characters within, and yes, even the settings where those dreams took place, could make their way out of her head and onto the streets. It had been all too common a sight, before the zinc lined box arrived, for a pterodactyl to perch its oversized claws onto the satellite dish on the roof of Jim Hargreaves’s corner store. “Ain’t no hope in heck that those boys runnin’ the insurance is gonna pay for this damage,” Jim would roar, as he fired two rounds of buckshot up at the dream-bird. “Go on now! Scat!! Get outta here!”
And I can assure you Reader that that was hardly the worst of it. When Bailey Sarsquatch had a nightmare, the townsfolk had to hide in their basements. But even that wasn’t the worst of it either. The worst, most painful part, was the sadness after… after… well… what happened to me.
I met someone you see… a guy named Safe House. He had a head of hair on him like the softest sheep’s wool. His face was like a Greek statue in its hay day… not wetherworn with an exfoliated snout. He was courteous and strong, could be serious whenever the situation required, but was playful, funny and lighthearted whenever it did not. He was my kind of man… my dream man you might say…
We were married on the third night that we met. I was a night shift worker, by the way, in the Always Open Video Store. The first night that he came in, he told me that his favourite actor was Paul Newman, and he wanted anything at all with him in it. Sadly, the store only stocked new releases, but happily, I was coming towards the end of my shift. I always watched a movie when I got home in the morning. It was the best way for me to unwind and hopefully sleep through the dawn of the day. I invited Safe House over to watch my favourite Paul Newman movie – Nobody’s Fool. It was a risk, I knew, but I desperately wanted him to say yes.
If he would have killed me that morning, I’d have enjoyed every mini-moment up until the second of my death. But he didn’t kill me. If anything he did the opposite. Parts of me that had been dead before were resurrected. He brought me back to life and made feel so happy that I could hardly believe it.
And then the zinc box arrived, and Bailey Sarsquatch climbed inside and made an oath to the town that she would never take another wink of sleep outside of its bounds. I applauded with the rest of the townspeople. That evening, my husband, Safe House, didn’t come home. He’d only been in town for the three days since we’d met. He’d been earning a crust by doing handyman work for Jim Hargreaves. I went to the corner store.
“‘I sure am sorry Sweetheart. Safe done disappeared.”
“What do you mean he disappeared? Are you sain’ he split? He spun outta town?”
“No darlin’… he literally vanished… I watched him fade into thin air and oblivion, soon after darn Bailey Sarsquatch got into that zinc box o’ hers. He was roarin’ somethin’… like it was a message… and now, with you bein’ so upset and all, I can’t help thinkin’… that message musta been for you.”
“What message?”
“Tell her I didn’t know… tell her I didn’t know… that poor son of a gun musta thunk he was real.”
